"However, in our faithful listening to God's Word, we often neglect his first word to us- the gift of ourselves: our existence, our temperament, our personal history, our uniqueness, our flaws and foibles, our identity. Our very existence is one of the never-to-be-repeated ways God has chosen to express himself in space and time. Because we are made in God's image and likeness, you and I are yet another promise that he has made to the universe that he will continue to love it and care for it.
"Yet even if we accept the fact that we are a word uttered by God, we may not grasp what he is trying to say through us. In Seeds of Contemplation Merton writes, 'God utters me like a word containing a partial thought of himself. A word will never be able to comprehend the voice that utters it. But if I am true to the concept God utters in me, if I am true to the thought in him I was meant to embody, I shall be full of his actuality and find him everywhere in myself, and find myself nowhere. I shall be lost in him.'
"In patient endurance we wait for God to make clear what he wants to say through us. Such waiting demands not only alert attention but the courage to let ourselves be spoken. Such courage arises from unfailing trust in the wisdom of God, who utters no false word."
-Ruthless Trust: The Ragamuffin's Path to God, by Brennan Manning
